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Jim Hightower, the legendary hellion populist out of Texas (yes, such a beast once roamed the earth) used to say that the only thing in the middle of the road is "yellow stripes and dead armadillos." By this he meant to say that being a centrist robbed a person of conviction, purpose, and clarity and probably made you more prone to be flattened by a truck. The only way to avoid such a sorry fate was to declare loud and proud which side you're on in the great pitched binary battle of American democracy. But this is not what we mean here when we talk about this thing called the American Center. Just because you find yourself in the center doesn't mean that you are just so much electoral roadkill. Or that you lack strong opinions or make weak political choices. Far from it.

In that vein, pollsters and politicians alike have over the past generation become obsessed with people who, after a two-year campaign, describe themselves as "undecided" about whom they plan to vote for a week before an election, or with people who call themselves "independent" of either of our sclerotic political parties, as if by solving the riddle of these two groups they will at last have found the Ark of the Covenant. Appealing to these tiny groups of voters makes some people — the media most avidly — believe that they have found the sweet spot at the heart of American public opinion. But that isn't true, and it is also not what we are talking about when we talk about the Center. If you are truly undecided when push comes to shove, you are generally hopeless or not likely to vote anyway, and if you call yourself independent, chances are you're not. In any case, reading the minds of every one of those people wouldn't get us any closer to truly knowing what most Americans actually believe, which is precisely what we mean when we talk about the Center: what most Americans actually believe.

Of course, today's firmly held belief is tomorrow's untenable position. And our politics have been so unstable for the past five years or so — really for almost a generation before that — and the tectonic plates have broken and shifted under our feet to such a degree that most of us sense that a profound transformation has taken place, but none of us — not even the professional opinion makers, especially not them — can tell what is actually going on here. For any number of reasons—war fatigue, debt fatigue, globalization, the cultural depth charge of Barack Obama's election — there has been a disorienting sea change in American attitudes across the board — gay marriage, debt spending, security versus privacy, America's role in the world, etc. For a generation, our trusty labels liberal and conservative have been adequate to the task of describing our differences on these and just about any other issue. Our culture wars have always been fought with the language of politics, but now the language itself is broken, the labels are meaningless, and our normal tools for understanding ourselves are hopelessly outdated. And seldom has there been a time in which the extreme partisanship of Washington has been more disconnected from the actual national mood and values.

The common perception, the hoary conventional wisdom, is that we as a people are now hopelessly polarized in our culture, our values, and our politics, and that the Center has shrunk to nothing. This is of course true in Washington. Much of the energy in the politics since the election of Barack Obama has come from the far Right, its highly gerrymandered id firmly entrenched in the House of Representatives. This freebased version of Republicanism isn't reflective of broad national feeling, though, and is in fact evidence of politics distorting reality itself. Just ask Jeb Bush, who recently said that his father and Ronald Reagan wouldn't have a place in today's Republican party.

To bring coherence to this national confusion and find out the truth of where we stand, Esquire partnered with NBC News to commission a sophisticated segmentation poll to measure not the stark binary differences tracked by typical public-opinion polls but rather a fully calibrated range of opinion, across the vast array of political choices we as Americans now face. To be sure that its findings were as far removed from the prevailing political interests as possible, the poll was designed and conducted in ecumenical fashion, by both the Benenson Strategy Group, President Obama's pollster, and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted the polls for Governor Romney.

What we found is very surprising: Not only is the center not shrinking, but it is growing, and now actually constitutes approximately 51 percent of the electorate, spanning the full range of income and geography.

People in this new Center are much calmer about some of the hot-button issues of today than are the extremes or the population at large — they do not fear the reach of the federal government, for instance, and don't think that Washington is unreasonably coming for our private information or (in the aggregate) our guns. For the moment, they tend to trust Democrats more than Republicans, and by big margins they support abortion, gay marriage, and legalizing pot, all classic examples of if-it-doesn't-hurt-me-why-should-I-mind issues. At the same time they are tired of affirmative action, they are wary of granting illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and they are inward-looking after a decade of costly internationalism.

The overwhelming driver defining this new American Center is a feeling of an uncertain economic destiny and fear of the future. The importance of the sense of sustained economic peril that has gripped the country since 2008 cannot be overstated in how it has shaped the choices, opinions, and psychology of this cohort of Americans. And while there is great demographic variety in this new American Center, this extraordinarily large cohort has in common an alienation from political parties in general and conventional labels in particular. "The very real shift that we see isn't one that you'd find if you are only thinking of defining the country in terms of deep blue and deep red," says Daniel Franklin, a principal at the Benenson Group. "A big change is how some elements of the Center itself are pulled in two different directions simultaneously. You have a group like the white working class [Pickup Populists, see page 146], which is expressing such a strong populism, something we didn't see ten years ago, that you'd think they would be strongly bonded to the Democratic party. But they are also strongly attached to the Right on cultural issues, such as concerns about gun rights. Now, maybe those concerns aren't new, but the equal and simultaneous pull in opposite directions is new."

On a rather sobering note, at the moment, the superseding narrative for the Center is essentially this: holding on to what they've got. "One of the dramatic things that we have noticed is that people in the middle are no longer necessarily looking forward," says Franklin. "At the moment, they're fearing that they will slip backward instead of being forward-looking and hopeful that they'll get ahead. The financial ambitions of past generations, and the idea that what their lives are about is becoming successes, is much rarer than it was twenty or thirty years ago. A classic response to economic hardship is a pulling inward, and that is what we are seeing here. The mind-set of hardship took us years to adapt; it could take us years more to get over."

In political terms, these Americans are up for grabs, but you've got to be substantive, and you'd better leave your party's hobbyhorses back at headquarters. Most importantly, and most hopefully: Emanating strongly from this rich and complex set of data from which the most complete and useful portrait of the new American Center has emerged comes this theme, expressed in a dozen different ways: a demand for the classic American notion of fairness.